Atul’s passion for science at school, motivated him to become a physicist, graduating with Bachelor of Science (Honours) at University of Delhi, India. He then professionally qualified as a Chartered Accountant and Management Accountant to work in mining, manufacturing and ship-building industries for over 25 years. He has been Managing Director, General Manager and Commercial Manager of various companies in Australia and overseas. These included major organisations such as Roche Mining Ltd (EDI Downer Group) and Transfield Shipbuilding Ltd (Transfield Group). He is a senior member of professional bodies, such as The Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia, Australian Institute of Company Directors, CPA Australia, The Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), of which he was the Australian President. Currently, he is Program Director at the Faculty of Business & Law at Edith Cowan University, where he is keenly teaching and coordinating MBA and MPA units in Australia and overseas, for the last four years.

His passion for science and business has been ignited again, this time applying quantitative contemporary methodologies in “decision-making” to mining. Atul has therefore embarked upon his PhD journey at the CET, under the supervision of Professors Pietro Guj, Daniel Packey and Bryan Maybee. His research is focussed on developing decision-making tools under uncertainty for mineral exploration and mining projects. This requires real options valuation (ROV), so that the value of flexibility, inherent to or designed into a project or in a commercial deal is determined. ROV using binomial lattices or decision trees provide a feasible framework for making sound financial evaluations and decisions under uncertainty, but can lead to significant computational complexity. Atul’s research incorporates building models using powerful dynamic programming language software, to solve these complex decision trees, for decision-making in mineral exploration and mining projects.

Atul has since written and presented with Professor Guj, the paper "Valuing vendor consideration: Performance shares and options" at the recent VALMIN conference in Perth. His second paper with Professor Guj, “Real option valuations of mineral exploration/mining projects using decision trees: Differentiating market risk from private risk” will be presented by them at the 2012 AusIMM Conference in Melbourne. Atul and Professor Guj intend to present their third paper “Valuing switching options using decision trees for mineral exploration / mining projects” at an overseas conference in 2012. These research papers enable establishing the foundations of Atul’s PhD at the CET.